Abstract
The article describes the retreat of the state from public infrastructures in advanced industrial countries and tests the power of theoretical approaches to explain this reform process. The authors’ data show changes in state ownership in formerly public monopoly enterprises in telecommunications, electricity, and aviation sectors of 26 countries between 1970 and 2000. Combining various analytical techniques, the authors use partial-order scalogram analysis to visualize the similarity of institutional structures and country-specific development trajectories. By pooled time-series regression they show that only the liberalization of capital markets has a significant effect on infrastructure privatization. The effects of party ideology, veto players, or corporatist interest group systems are rather insignificant over the whole period. However, by an innovative use of yearly ordinary least squares regressions, they show that governmental ideology holds great predictive power for privatization in the 1980s but not for the 1990s, when almost all countries had privatized.
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